Coaching and mentoring are two critical instruments in every organization for success in all areas, including management, productivity, and effectiveness. Many managers fail as managers because they do not mentor or coach their personnel. Employees are an organization's most precious resource, so they should be trained, coached, and mentored in order to create an efficient and high-performing organization (D'Abate et al 43). Coaching entails providing people with the tools, knowledge, and chances they need to fully develop themselves in order to be effective in their dedication to themselves, the company, and their work. It's, therefore, a form of training to help enhance a person's personal development in their career (Clutterbuck, and David 8). The employees should, therefore, be exposed to opportunities that would enable them to become more efficient for high and quality performance in the organization. On the other hand mentoring is a relationship between two individuals with a mutual desire for development in their career goals and objectives (D’Abate, 42). Therefore it involves encouraging employees in an organization to work towards attaining their career goals in respect to the aims of the organization. Through this mentors do have an opportunity to showcase their leadership skills and expand their perspectives on some aspects of the operations of organizations. It hence therefore promotes leadership in an organization.
Similarities and Differences of Coaching and Mentoring
Differences
Basis
Coaching
Mentoring
Relationship
Is a non-reporting relationship i.e a team leader from another division maybe your manager
Is a reporting one
Expertise
The team leader, is an expert in Required area
The expert has a wide range of skills
Focus
Focuses on short term needs
Focus is on long term
needs
Feedback
Provides feedback to employees
Both the mentor and mentee gets feedback.
Similarities
Both enable individuals who go through the whole the process to achieve their full potential by enhancing their personal development.
Both are learning relationships that help individuals to develop personally.
They both facilitate insight, learning, and change among individuals involved.
Both of them base their assumptions on basic values and beliefs that human beings have the ability to change hence make right choices for themselves.
Purpose of coaching and mentoring
The primary purpose of coaching and mentoring are;
To help an individual to develop personally and professionally in a particular area of specialization.
To enable an individual to develop personally through the transfer of knowledge and skills using another person's experience in a particular field.
To help facilitate development, learning, and performance in an individual.
To help people renew their abilities and maximize their potential using the knowledge and the skills they have acquired during the whole processes.
To help individuals develop their competencies to management hence fulfill their full potential.
To provide support to individuals for personal development in a given field.
Key benefits to stakeholders
Organization
Some of the key benefits of Couching to stakeholders include the Increased productivity in the organization due to wide range of shared skills and training. It helps in recruitment, retention, and development of key employees (Garvey, 23). Couching also helps with succession planning as it develops future leaders and managers of an organization. It encourages knowledge sharing and skill transfer in an organization. In addition, Couching provides a stabilizing factor in the case of any change within the organization and even outside.
Individual
The benefits attributed to an individual are diverse and include an Increased motivation and morale to perform in every task that are assigned to employees. There is also an Improved performance in their daily operations. It encourages employees to tackle difficult tasks faced ahead by them in their areas of specialization (Garvey, 23). Couching Provides an opportunity for the individuals to develop their social networks. It also helps them to manage stress effectively while at work. In addition Couching provides a relaxed environment for discussion thus allowing them to air out their problems to find a solution for them.
Coach and Mentor
The idea of couching gives a couch and mentor an opportunity to practice their skills and knowledge with other people. It enables them to get insight into the needs and problems of an organization. It also allows them to get satisfaction when they see other people develop personally. Additionally, they also gain respect in an organization when it is done effectively, and people involved become effective in their performance.
Types of coaching
Business coaching
It involves imparting business skills to an individual to help him/her gain the appropriate knowledge and skills for proper management of business.
Executive coaching
Executive Coaching is done to equip the executive members of an organization with necessary tools and knowledge to develop to fully utilize their potential for effective management of an organization. They are paid by the organization itself. Its major emphasis is on leadership, politics, strategy, and relationships.
Life coaching
This type of coaching is based on imparting skills and knowledge on self-fulfillment and life decisions among various individuals in an organization based on their career and personal businesses. It's, therefore, necessary to help employees to make the right and correct decisions in every aspect of their life.
Types of Mentoring
Reverse monitoring
Reverse Mentoring is where a younger expertise mentors an older member of an organization who has got experience. It helps to close the gap between the two parties hence allowing them to share knowledge from both. They both gain out of the training.
Team/Group mentoring
Team mentoring is more of a formal type in which the mentor mentors multiple mentees at the same time in a particular geographical area. It allows for an exchange of information, knowledge, and skills to a large group of individuals at the same time. It, therefore, reduces costs to be used for the mentoring program. This mentoring should be implemented since it is cheap compared to the other types.
Situational Mentoring
Situational mentoring focuses on a particular purpose at a given time. It, therefore, speeds the whole learning process and transfer of knowledge and skills to individuals in an organization. It's majorly applied when a particular issue arises that needs to be looked into immediately for the organization's operation to continue.
Role of line managers in coaching and mentoring
Line managers have a role to play in coaching and mentoring of the employees in an organization. A keen evaluation of these roles defines their specific duties in the whole process of transferring knowledge and various skills which include the following;
Facilitating learning and results
The major role here is to help individuals reflect and support them to analyze their performance. Additionally, they create opportunities for them to learn, plan and monitor their performance and give appropriate advice where necessary.
Help promote effective communication
Every line manager in an organization has a duty to teach the employees about effective communication during coaching and monitoring. For example the barriers of effective communication, active listening, type of communication. This is important during this process as both the parties are on one on one communication.
The knowledge of ethic, professional standards and boundaries.
This is a basic knowledge that a line manager must have. Line manager must be aware of other people's expectations and relevant professional standards to reduce any of disagreement during the process. Under this role, it's necessary that the two parties are open and transparent and agree on the basic standards and moral ethic of coaching and mentoring. Line managers have therefore a role to observe these standards for effective imparting of knowledge and skills to others.
Build relationships and positive role modeling
The line managers have a role to build trust in the people they would want to change their thinking. Anyone who is interested to impart knowledge and skills to other people must gain some amount of trust from them. Therefore the line managers have to gain trust from their colleagues to make coaching and mentoring effective in an organization.
Factors considered when implementing coaching and mentoring
Cost of coaching and mentoring
Every goal of an organization is to minimize its cost of production and maximize its profits. Therefore before performing this process, an organization has to consider the cost of carrying it out. If the costs are less compared to the gains, then it's carried out.
Benefits of both coaching and mentoring program
Organizations aspire to be leading and well performing. They would, therefore, use all means possible to achieve their objective hence they should look at the benefits of conducting both coaching and mentoring to help them develop hence improve performance.
Objectives and expectations
Objectives and expectations should also consider the objectives of doing the coaching and mentoring for example if it is to improve the performance of the employees then the focus should be just on that.
Time
Time is a major factor that needs to be considered by the organization. This organization has to look at the duration of time that this process would take such that if will take a longer period of time they should look for alternative way to reduce the time and avoid wastage of time.
Method and format of doing coaching and mentoring
Another key factor to consider is method and format of carrying out the whole process of mentoring and coaching. This is to help prepare adequately the mentees and avail the necessary facilities.
Section 2
Recommendations and possible strategy for future Mentoring
Based on the assessment, the following recommendations should be taken by the management for successful coaching and mentoring. The first recommendation is giving immediate performance feedback. The management should clearly and specifically state what they have observed after the whole process of coaching and mentoring. Again they should communicate face to face on both positive and negative performance efforts (Foster-Turner and Julia, 34). This will help monitor the performance of the employees after coaching and mentoring. Another possible strategy is on motivating employee performance. To improve the performance of the employees, the management should recognize the work that's well done by the employee and even reward them appropriately. Besides, the employees should be challenged by giving them difficult but feasible tasks to perform to motivate them to even do more in their work (Foster-Turner and Julia, 34). The couch should also mentor employee growth by passing words of wisdom to guide behavior for success in their work. Here the employees need to be asked to provide for ideas that would enable them to improve their performance.
The third possible strategy is to examine other options apart from mentoring/coaching. The management should explore other options that would help to improve the organization's performance and that of the workers. For example, training the mentors or coaches so as to help them gather more knowledge and skills. Again they could retrench some of the employees if it is necessary. The couch should also be ready to establish the will to make changes to make changes that need to be made to reach a particular goal of the organization. Thus the organization should be willing to embrace any change that would be of value to them while conducting mentoring and coaching programs to their employees Also, The the organization should reinforce good performance. The management should use the same method they had used to capture employees good performance to also capture low quality performance by the employees. This is to help reinforce good performance by the employees.
There should be a clearly Set and well-defined goals within the organization. The management has to be very specific while setting their goals concerning coaching and mentoring. This is to help employees to focus on the specific goals set while undergoing through the whole process of coaching and mentoring. Delegation of duties is also a good approach in organization. Management has to determine what results they would want to achieve. Additionally, they have to set the parameters and necessary supporting tools that they employees may need while undergoing coaching and mentoring. Again they should set time to conduct progress reviews along the way of the whole processes.
The management should carry out training to the employees. The management should give a step by step instruction of performing a particular skill. This aids the employees to master procedures of performing the various skills in the organization. This training is meant to improve on their performance within the organization. Another strategy can be through assessing employee performance. The managers are advised to regularly monitor the performance of their employees. They should not wait for an annual review to carry out the assessment. This is to help identify the various areas that the employees have failed in and advise on the necessary action to take after that. The employees should also be assisted in career development. The management should set out plans that would help employees to grow their skills and understanding of their careers. A great focus should also be placed on employee performance. The management should able to set out plans with specific action plans that define the specific steps towards achieving those goals. This is to help the employees to specifically focus on the goals and the agenda of the process of mentoring and coaching. Finally, the management should consider the use of qualified coaches and mentors. The managers should invite coaches and mentors with diverse experience and these qualified to mentor and coach the employees. For example coaches and mentors with qualities such as the willingness to share knowledge and expertise, positive attitudes and enthusiastic in the field.
Strategies for the intended future coaching and mentoring activities
As an intended coach, the following will steer up the success of the career in the organization. First, As a couch, it will be better to organize training for potential mentors and coaches to help them to develop skills and knowledge required to conduct mentoring and coaching. Training is an essential thing for every individual who aspires to succeed in any field therefore for the mentors/coaches to impart and develop competent skills they have to undergo training which I would liaise for funding with the management. Secondly, As a couch and mentor, it will be right to commit time and energy to learn mentoring and coaching. This would also help gain more skills and knowledge that would develop mentoring and coaching. To develop mentoring and coaching, I would be willing to dedicate my time and energy to pass out wisdom and even take the time to learn the whole process of mentoring and coaching. Also, one should be a keen observant of the employees during the process of mentoring and coaching. This can be done by observing employees response to the process. Again it is wise to observe their listening skills and their ability to respond to various questions posted.
There also will be an objective in dealing with the people undergoing through mentoring and coaching. While mentoring and coaching the employees, the work would be to focus on the objectives of the whole process to fully equip and impart the necessary skills and knowledge. For example, if the objective is to improve workers performance then the option will be to just stick to that. There should also be a maintained confidentiality. One best quality of a mentor/coach is to be confident thus I would maintain some level of confidence to make the employees fully understand the message I would be passing out to them (Passmore and Jonathan, 32). By being confident they will be willing to listen to all the mentoring process considering the level of seriousness displayed. Another tactic will be to develop the ability to recognize a change in moods and body language. Just like stated earlier, a couch should be a keen observant to identify any slight variations in the moods and body language of the employees who could be undergoing through mentoring and coaching. This is one quality that would help to understand the moods of the people and decide on what to give them within the shortest time possible.
Evaluating the coaching and /mentoring programs. Before conducting the program is also part of a successful preparation in coaching (MacLennan and Nigel, 23). As a couch, it will be a first priority to assess and analyze keenly the program to determine its viability and feasibility. This is necessary to help reduce any resource wastage and duplications in the organization. The mentoring section will also be free and open to new ideas from the employees and other experienced mentors/coaches. This helps to gain diverse knowledge and skills that I may not have. The knowledge and expertise I would gain would be of value as they are acquired from diverse and a variety of sources. When people share, a lot of information is exchanged during the interaction hence this would help in passing out wisdom.
As a good couch, being enthusiastic is a sense of showing some form of interest in a particular field. Therefore as a mentor/coach, it is right to show a lot of interest in my work to help others learn to develop personally. Developing others by passing out knowledge and skills to them would be my priority. Also, there will be a significant willingness to listen to all opinions. As a mentor or coach one has to hear to other people's opinion and views on various subjects. This allows a lot of information and knowledge to be exchanged (Hawrkins, et al. 41). Therefore as a couch, first it is advisable to have the time to hear what other have to say and come to a conclusion later. From this alone, there will be a platform for gaining some knowledge and passing out at the same time.
The mentoring programs will also include the moment of challenging the employee's way of thinking. This can be done by giving them some difficult but feasible tasks to perform that would even change their way of thinking. A number of these tasks would form part of an experience for them that would help improve their performance (Russell, et al. 14). Also, encouraging employees to become involved in new experiences at all time makes mentoring programs more effective. This can be done by pushing for shifts in different areas of work within the organization to help employees gain new experiences in the course of performing their job (Noe and Raymond, 464). The new experiences help them to acquire new skills and knowledge to make the organization efficient. Lastly, wit will be important to assess performance after coaching/mentoring (Orth, et al.67). It's essential to evaluate the employee performance to check whether they gained out of the whole process and took appropriate action where necessary.
Conclusion
In summary, organizations do face some problems some of which are mostly caused by the employees due to lack particular skills and knowledge. It's, therefore, necessary for the management to hire mentors/coaches to help solve such problems. Mentoring and coaching are a key aspect for every organization success. The main advantages are diverse and cannot be ignored. They range from personal development of the employees, increased production, improved performance, having a competitive advantage over other competitors, reduced costs, etc. Organizations must also hire quality mentors/coaches with diverse experience and full of knowledge who can fully develop the employees. The line managers have a bigger role to play in the success of the whole process of mentoring/coaching hence they should always be ready to help others develop their potential fully. Again the mentors/coaches should undergo regular training to equip them further with knowledge and skills to transfer to the employees in the organization. Some mentoring and coaching types should be implemented for the success of that organization e.g. life coaching, executive coaching, reverse mentoring, team mentoring, among others.
Work Cited
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